Installation of SCOM 2007 R2

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 is the latest monitoring platform from Microsoft that manage hetergenous systems and applications, including both Microsoft and non-Microsoft. SCOM relies on Management Pack (MP) created by its developers and partners to monitor specific systems and applications.

The components of SCOM 2007 R2 should be installed in the following orders:

1. Operations Database Server - MS SQL server for data storage
2. Root Management Server (RMS) and console - First monitoring server
3. Management Servers - Subsequent monitoring servers
4. Reporting Server and Data Warehouse Server - Generate reports
5. ACS Database Server and ACS Collection Server - Audit Collection Services for storing security events and logs
6. Gateway Server - Collect data from multiple agents residing outside of trusted internal domain.
7. Agentless Exception Monitoring - Collecting crash information from computers without SCOM agents
8. Operations Manager Agents - Agents residing on managed systems. Collect system information and send to management server
9. ACS Forwarders

For a quick-start, this technet blog depicted step-by-step SCOM installation guide with pictures. Nevertheless, MS SQL Server 2008 must first be installed (MS SQL 2008 step-by-step).

SolarWinds Orion Part 2 - Monitoring Interfaces

After the new node is added in part 1, all the interfaces will be listed out for you. Typically, you would pay particular attention to interfaces that are prone to congestion and link errors e.g. WAN interfaces. Solarwinds also automatically calculate the bandwidth utilization based on the default bandwidth of the interface. For example, Solarwinds assumes 1000Mbps bandwidth for Gigabit Ethernet (GE) interface and traffic usage of 8Mbps will constitute less than 1% utilization rate. What if that interface is connected to your service provider device that provides only 10Mbps? That would become 80% high utilization instead!

To customise the actual bandwidth, click on the interface and click on "edit interface" button. Check on "Custom Bandwidth" and enter the actual transmit and recieve bandwidth.

SolarWinds Orion Part 1 - Adding nodes to NPM

We have recently implemented SolarWinds Orion as part of our Network Management Systems (NMS), which is pretty essential if you're managing a large network. You would want to monitor and track the network device status, configuration changes, network traffic and bandwidth utilization within the network. SolarWinds Orion is made up of several sub-modules that handle different aspects of NMS. For example, SolarWinds Netflow module is necessary to track network application usage and the Network Configuration Manager (NCM) is needed to track configuration changes.

Above all, you would first need to have the Network Performance Monitor (NPM) installed as the base module before you can do anything more. NPM is simply used to monitor the network devices up/down status, as well as measuring basic bandwidth utilization rate at the interface level. Hence, adding new network nodes to the NPM is the first step.

To add new nodes, you can either manually add a single node or enable a network discovery sweep to add multiple nodes at one go. Either way, you must first supply the node IP addresses and SNMP credentials (SNMPv3 is recommended for security reasons). Hence, you must first enable SNMP on the network devices.

For Cisco IOS devices:

'define the snmp scope
(config)# snmp-server view SNMPVIEW dod included
'create a snmp group and permit the group read access to the above view
(config)# snmp-server group SNMPGROUP v3 auth read SNMPVIEW access SNMP_ACL
'create a snmp user and add it to the above group
(config)# snmp-server user SNMPUSER SNMPGROUP v3 auth sha **** access SNMP_ACL
'permit SNMP polling only from the NMS server
(config)# ip access-list standard SNMP_ACL
(config-std-nacl)# permit 1.1.1.1
(config-std-nacl)# deny any

After that, login to SolarWinds Orion as administrator, click on "Manage Node" and then "Add Node". Uncheck the box beside ICMP (Ping only). Supply the node IP address and the SNMP credential that you created above. You can also save the SNMP credential as a template account for subsequent nodes.